Top 11 “Greatest” NCAA Football Players of 2014, On Twitter

Each year, EA sports releases the lastest version of their “NCAA Football” game franchise.

And each year, the team down at EA Sports must rank all the Division 1 players in terms of over overall talent and ability.

This year’s rankings for the 2014 season started making their way around the Internet this week after Tradition Sports Online got ahold of the info at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, last week in Los Angeles. Buzzfeed posted the Top 11 this morning.

But as it is 2014 and all, when nothing matters until the social universe has spoken, we decided to see how EAs top players fared in the Twitterverse.

First we ran an analysis to determine how much activity each player has received on Twitter, over the past year.

Johnny Manziel, the heisman trophy winning quarterback for Texas A&M, aka “Johnny Football,” took the definitive top spot in Tweet volume. There were 500+ thousand Tweets with his name in it, the last year. This was almost more than the next five closest players combined. The next most Tweeted about player over the last was Braxton Miller at 179,874.

In Total, there were 1,169,749 total Tweets for the entire Top 11 over the last year.

Next, we how people felt about each of EA’s Top 11 players, using sentiment analysis. The Topsy Sentiment Score score is computed based on hundreds of millions of tweets every day and has a range from 0 – 100 with 50 being neutral (i.e. higher scores are more positive), Again Johnny Football was victorious, scoring 71 overall for the year.

Sentiment graph for “Johnny Manziel,” over the last year.

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Once he began his momentum toward Heisman glory, Manziel’s sentiment never wavered, except once, when it dropped significantly in February of last year, when he sued a man in Texas selling T-shirts for infringement of the rights to his nickname, “Johnny Football.”